Tacit
by Verite Sui Generis
Summary: They've never needed words to understand each other.
Once she would have shown him because he was Roy, the covert hard worker that kept her company in her lonely world and actually understood how to keep a house clean. Once she had been a wild girl and he'd been her partner in crime, her comrade.

She's no longer a wild girl, the young soldier is a stranger to her, and her father is dead. She is sad, yes, but relieved too, which carries its own kind of guilt. She doesn't know if she shows him because she's being crushed under the weight of her various burdens and needs someone to lighten it, if it's because he's going to be stationed in Ishval in a month and she wants him to have the best chance of survival, or because he is more her father's protege than she has ever been

Maybe she shows him because she suspects that her father always meant for her to undress for Roy Mustang.

He doesn't touch her, but she can feel his palm hover over her skin. She knows without looking that he's right behind her, invading her personal space, bent forward to get a better look. His hair brushes her skin and it makes her jump and makes him maintain some semblance of distance.

She doesn't want distance. She's had enough distance, enough solitude, enough guilt. She wants, more than anything to not think, just for a few moments, so she whirls and kisses him. She doesn't stop to think about it beforehand or she would have at least considered that he likely had no interest in her. The way his fingers curl in her hair would have proved her wrong anyway. She wonders later, lying face-down so he can trace the lines of her tattoo with his mouth, if one day she'll regret losing her virginity not for love, but for distraction. She doesn't know if Roy understood that she was using him. She doesn't know if he would care.

He doesn't leave and she doesn't ask him to. He spends his days in her father's study, working to decipher flame alchemy, and she spends her days tying up the loose ends that her father's death left. They spend their nights wrapped up in each other and they slowly get to know each other again. She doesn't realize at first when it becomes less about distraction and more about the heat of his touch and the way he hisses out through his teeth when he comes. She doesn't realize how much she enjoys having him around until he goes to Central. She does realize how she feels when he comes back with a pocket watch and one night before his train. He's attentive and he takes his time and she drinks in his features, his wood smoke and cinnamon scent, and the warmth of his skin. She falls asleep in his arms and wakes up alone.

His first letter tells her that he's made it to Ishval and that the desert is hot and miserable, and he's been saddled with a guy who won't stop talking about his girlfriend back home.

His second letter tells her that he misses her, and that specialized orders came through for the State Alchemists.

His third letter never comes at all. Her eighteenth birthday does, though, and she spends most of it at a recruitment office.

They don't meet again for another three years, and when they do, she's twenty and he's twenty three and they're both killers. She calls him "Major" and he calls her "Cadet" and it becomes a wall between them.

The wall lasts for exactly one month and fourteen days. He ignites a building that's hiding rebels, and learns only too late that there was a little girl on the upper floor. Her high, agonized screams follow him back to camp. Hughes finds him with a gun in his mouth, blacks his eye, and drags him to Cadet Hawkeye.

He shouldn't fall into her bed (bunk) but he does. She smells like sand and gunpowder, but she doesn't seem to mind the way he reeks of charred flesh and blood, so he doesn't complain. He buries his loathing in the cavern of her mouth and the soft heat between her thighs and forgets, just for a few brief moments, that he's a killer.

It's not a relationship, what they have. It might have been, years ago, but that's not what this is. They come together out of a desperate need to feel human. She handles herself better than he does, but she still sobs his name and rakes her nails down his back hard enough to draw blood. He in turn leaves bite marks and bruises on her skin.

In clearer moments, he knows with no false modesty that she's here for him. He's hers to protect, and apparently she is his only to destroy. He dragged her into this hell with him, turned her into a monster too, and one dark night at the end of the years-long massacre, he puts her through hell again. Tear tracks cut through the sand and dirt on her cheeks and the fresh burns are ugly and oozing, and still she somehow manages to spit her belt out from between her teeth and thank him in a voice that's raw from screaming. He walks out of the tent and finds a convenient abandoned building to lose the meager rations that had been his dinner.

He doesn't try to find her when the war ends. He wants her by his side always and wants with equal fervor to never see her again. She makes the decision for him, and pathetic man that he is, he's too weak to turn her away.

The next time is when Hughes dies. By this point, it's been years since they've been together, but when he shows up stumbling drunk at her apartment and kisses her clumsily, she doesn't stop him. He'll wonder later if she ever would. He won't honestly remember the sex itself, but he will remember breaking and crying like a child into her shoulder while her fingers stroke his hair. She holds him the entire night and never once tells him that it will be okay.

He doesn't see her until two days after the humonculous dies, but she comes into the room of his hospital while Havoc's asleep. She presses him into the mattress and kisses him, burying her fingers in his hair to jerk his head back so she can worry his lower lip with her teeth. They're both breathing heavily when she lets him go - and slaps him so hard that it wakes Jean from a painkiller-induced stupor. She then turns on her heel and leaves without a word.

He still hasn't healed fully when she's reassigned to Bradley, but he goes to her apartment that night, pins her against her front door and seals his mouth over hers. She hooks a leg around his hip and digs her heel into his thigh. They leave each other covered in bruises and bite marks and scratches, and fall asleep in an embrace. She's gone when he wakes.

He doesn't know, then, what's to come. If he did, he would doubtlessly drink in the sight of her every chance he gets. He would lurk around doors and near her apartment just to catch a glimpse of her walking Black Hayate or moving through the halls, going about the Fuhrer's business. He does nothing of the sort, and regrets it bitterly when he realizes that he will never see her (or anything) again.

He hears her, when she comes into his hospital room. Well, he hears someone enter, but it isn't until he catches the scent of gun grease that he knows it's her. She sits by his knees and catches his hand when he gropes for hers. His thumb rubs across her knuckles, feeling the myriad of scrapes she's obtained, and slowly travels up her arm and over her shoulder until he finds her jaw. She stays perfectly still as he maps out her brows with his fingertips, finds the swell of the bruise on her cheekbone, traces the slope of her nose and explores the feel of a hard scab on her split lip.

His fingers are so gentle on the thick bandage around her neck that she can't feel them, but he has a haunted expression and she knows that he's remembering the way he saw her last. She moves his hand and presses his fingers down, letting him feel her heartbeat, strong and steady. He frames her face between his palms and unerringly finds her eyes with his. "I love you."

She rolls her eyes, wondering why on earth he would think she needs to hear it out loud, and kisses him.


End file.
